Enlightenment: Wanting it vs. Working for It

  

 

Wes Annac, Contributor
Waking Times
Sometimes, we reach a point where we want to feel more connected with the Christ within; more connected with our essence, and when this happens, we might have to ask ourselves a few essential questions.
One of them is if we’re making choices throughout our day that are in alignment with our wish to be more connected. Are we helping ourselves live a lifestyle that’s truly inspired by spirit, or does the idea of staying connected only sound good at the surface?
Oftentimes, we’ll find when we take a serious, discerning look at ourselves that even though we think we want to be more connected, we still aren’t making choices that help us stay aligned. We’ll find that continuing to falter in some areas of life is what causes us to feel distant from love or spirit.
It’s safe to say that enlightenment (or spiritual evolution in general) is one of the hardest processes we’ll ever go through. It requires us to seriously and scrupulously examine everything about ourselves that keeps us from attaining our goal, and by the end of it all, we’ll have lost as much as we gained.
We’ll have gained more in the sense that we gave up our materialistic desires for something much better, but like Adyashanti and a few other teachers have told us, enlightenment is a destructive process. We’ll be uplifted by the end of it all, but we’re in for some pain if we aren’t willing to release our grip on the aspects of life that hold us back.

If there’s anything we’re unwilling to release, we’ll have trouble on the enlightenment path. In order to understand ourselves as God, we’ll have to be willing to transcend everything that keeps us from understanding our godliness, and it can definitely be hard.
The hardest part about it is watching the world continue its misaligned ways while we try to better ourselves, and this is where the most pain is usually felt. It’s hard to enact so many disciplines while the world continues to be hedonistic and uncaring, but it’s an unfortunate part of our spiritual growth that we’ll just have to accept, however hard it can be.
There’s a solution to the world’s problems, and we’re it. We’re the solution we’ve been waiting for, but in order to heal ourselves enough to heal the world, we’ll have to cease contributing to the aspects of our society that seem designed to keep us in lower, subservient states of consciousness.
Without becoming self-centered, we’ll want to examine everything about ourselves and determine what serves our spiritual growth and what hinders it. We’ll want to stay as open-minded as we can, as often as we can, but we won’t want our open-mindedness to lead us to things we know will hold us back.
We’ll want to let as much love flow out of our expanding minds and hearts as we can, and we’ll want to make sure everything we say and do is genuine and aligned with our vision. We’ll want to do away with limiting self-talk, like “I’m only human. Bickering and being unhappy are part of my nature. I’ll grow out of them someday”.
The goal of enlightenment is to basically stop being human; to rise above simple humanity into an omnipotent state of mind that’s free of the pains, worries and stresses that seem to come with being human. Yes, there will be times when negativity seems unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean we should feed it.
Anything less than mastery will cause us to fall short of our goals, and we’ll know we’re falling short of them because we’ll feel unhappy; as if something’s missing that we just can’t seem to find. Something is missing in most cases, and it’s the devoted spirituality and godliness that come with enlightenment.
Most of us are reaching a point where we can’t stand the way the world is right now and we want to make a change, but the best way to make this change is to make it from within.
We can’t expect the external world to change until we’ve made some crucial inner changes, and as long as we accept certain aspects of society or tell ourselves it’s all ‘normal’, we’ll continue to be divided and controlled from within.
It’s obvious that a change needs made, and we have to be the ones to make it. We have to be willing to shed and transcend every bit of limitation or humanity that keeps us from enlightening ourselves, and anything less could cause continued dissatisfaction.
Overall, we’ll want to take things easy and stop taking life as seriously as some of us have. I know this sounds contradictory to what I said above about taking enlightenment more seriously, but both realities are possible.
There are a lot of serious issues plaguing the earth right now, but the enlightened seeker is calm and still in the face of it all. The seeker who’s embraced pure nothingness has it all figured out, because in nothingness, we discover Source.
Source is found when the mind’s as still as it can be and we’ve transcended our surface perception to the best of our ability, which requires calm, patience and an array of other masterful qualities that some of us are currently unable to grasp.
Most of us are afraid of pure silence, stillness or nothingness, because our minds have created situation after situation, circumstance after circumstance and identity after identity to keep us distracted. We’re so enamored with the distractions we’ve created that all-out stillness sounds impossible or undesirable, but it’s all we need to enlighten ourselves.
Maybe we should ask ourselves how we feel about being completely still and silent. Yes, a lot needs done and said to change the world, but what’s better – changing the world with a noisy, spiritually unaware perspective or a still, masterful one?
It isn’t necessarily complacent to want to change the world from a still perspective. Some people automatically assume it is, because in their mind, the idea of being still while the elite keeps us oppressed spells treason to their planet, and that’s the last thing they’d want to do.
Changing the world is absolutely possible with a still, enlightened mind, and in fact, it’s a better way to do it. It doesn’t cause complacency or inaction – it boosts our awareness but allows us to address the situations that need addressed with a balanced perspective.
It’s easy to want to stay connected, but it’s harder to do the inner work that’s required. As contradictory as it might sound, the best way to stay connected is to keep the mind open and silent, and when we try it, we might be surprised at how easy our creativity and our meditations flow.
They’ll flow so easily because we’ll no longer be concerned with making them flow, and our mind will be too still and content to worry about it.
Limitation fades when we can quiet the mind, embrace stillness (and the nothingness that comes with it), and repeatedly examine ourselves to make sure we stay aligned, and this is the challenge we face at this crucial time in our collective evolution.
It’s up to us to decide if we’re up for it, and while most of us readily assume we are, we’ll find that there’s more diligence and inner work required than we expect. If we can stay dedicated and continue to detach from the mind’s overbearing influence (thereby using it the way it’s meant to be used), however, the end result will be paradise.

About the Author

Wes Annac is the author of The Culture of Awareness.  The Culture of Awareness features daily spiritual and alternative news, as well as articles I’ve written and more. Its purpose is to awaken and uplift by providing material that’s spiritually inspired and/or related to the fall of the planetary elite and our entrance into a positive future.
Wes can also be found on Facebook (Wes Annac and The Culture of Awareness) and Twitter.

source: http://www.wakingtimes.com/2015/01/16/enlightenment-wanting-vs-working/

Dolphins Have Human-Like Intelligence and Their Own ‘Language’

 
Anna LeMind, Guest
Waking Times
Dolphins are one of the most amazing and intelligent animal species on the planet. Their playful nature, friendly behavior and remarkable intelligence make people all over the world adore them. Moreover, it appears that dolphins demonstrate skills and awareness previously attributed only to humans.

HUMAN-LIKE INTELLIGENCE

Scientists at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia in the US, used MRI scanners to map the brains of dolphins and then compared the received data with that of other intelligent mammals, particularly primates. The scans showed that dolphin brains are up to five times larger for their body size compared to other animals of similar size. At the same time, their neocortex, a part of the brain responsible for higher thinking and emotion processing, was particularly large.
“If we use relative brain size as a metric of ‘intelligence’ then one would have to conclude that dolphins are second in intelligence to modern humans,” said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist at Emory University, and one of the world’s leading dolphin experts.
The same study also concluded that dolphins exhibit a number of human-like skills, such as comprehension of symbol-based communication systems, mirror self-recognition, and an understanding of abstract concepts.
“Dolphins are sophisticated, self-aware, highly intelligent beings with individual personalities, autonomy and an inner life. They are vulnerable to tremendous suffering and psychological trauma,” said Marino.
The findings of the study suggest that it’s unethical to use dolphins for our entertainment, keeping them in captivity in water parks, and killing them for food, as is currently happening in several countries in the world such as Japan, Peru, Solomon Islands, and the Faroe Islands where thousands of dolphins are killed every year. In this regard, Thomas White, a philosopher at Loyola Marymount University and the author of the book In Defense of Dolphins, said that “they should be treated as “non-human persons” and granted rights as individuals.” With India having already passed similar legislation, we are beginning to witness a paradigm shift in the mainstream on how we see these beautiful creatures.

DECIPHERING THE DOLPHIN LANGUAGE

It is a wide-known fact that dolphins use sound for orientation in space (via echolocation). However, it appears that they also have their own system of communication. Dolphins use a range of sounds and vocalizations, as well as physical contact and postures to communicate their emotional and physical state. They can also learn to read each other’s behaviors and signals to coordinate a number of activities such as feeding on fish or swimming together.
Scientists are trying to come up with a device that could decipher the sounds produced by dolphins. Jack Kassewitz, a researcher based in Miami, decided to use CymaScope, a device that makes sound visible, for just this purpose. He recorded the sounds produced by a dolphin when “seeing” objects, then turned them into images and showed them to the same dolphin again, this time without sound accompaniment.
The results showed that the dolphin managed to recognize the objects that corresponded to the images with an 86 % accuracy. Moreover, when the researcher showed the same pictures to another dolphin, it recognized the objects with the same accuracy! This suggests that cetaceans use sounds to communicate with each other in a similar way that we use words. Now, Kassewitz’s ambitious project titled SpeakDolphin is aimed at deciphering ‘dolphinese’ and starting basic communication with these amazing animals.

DR. DENISE HERZING’S HUMAN-TO-DOLPHIN TRANSLATOR

(The following is an article written by: James Vincent of The Independent) Researchers testing a real-life human-to-dolphin translator have reported the first successful use of their technology in the wild, with a bottlenose dolphin pointing out a piece of nearby seaweed to a scientist in the water. “I was like whoa! We have a match. I was stunned,” Dr Denise Herzing, the director of the Wild Dolphin Project and creator of the device, told the New Scientist.
Known as the Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry device (Chat), the translator uses a pair of hydrophones (underwater microphones) to capture the range of clicks and whistles made by dolphins. Rather than directly ‘translating’ these vocalisations into human speech, Dr Herzing has been teaching the dolphins a limited vocabulary defined by humans. This helps to simplify the massive range of noises made by dolphins, who produce sounds at frequencies up to 200 kilohertz – roughly 10 times higher than humans can hear. Dolphins, who are highly social animals capable of tool-use and self-recognition in the mirror, use signature whistles to refer to individuals within a pod and echolocation clicks as sonar, bouncing sounds off their environment as a hunting aid.
Dr Herzing has developed eight “words” that use dolphin-like vocalizations to refer to elements of the animals’ environment such as ‘seaweed’ and‘bow wave ride’ (when a dolphin rides the wave created by a boat). In her breakthrough moment with a pod she has studied for the last 25 years a dolphin made the unique whistle associated with ‘sargassum’, a type of seaweed. However, no one can say whether the dolphin was actively pointing out the vegetation, and the word has only been heard once.
Dr Herzing will be collaborating with Thad Starner, an artificial intelligence expert from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, to develop Chat, with the pair hoping to eventually begin analyzing the sounds made by the dolphins and creating a rough inter-species dictionary.

source: http://www.wakingtimes.com/2015/01/17/dolphins-human-like-intelligence-language/

6 Signs you May be an Übermensch

 

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff
Waking Times
“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge –a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.” –Nietzsche
The Übermensch, or Overman, is the primordial prodigy, the interdependent-self, the chameleon of the human condition, the epistemological elite longing to emerge. The Overman is the “genius” that Jesus spoke of in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth the genius within you, it will free you. If you do not bring forth the genius within you, it will destroy you.” In a world where the majority of people have not brought forth the genius within themselves, it is no wonder things are being destroyed. It is therefore the duty, indeed the quest, of overmen the world over to bring forth the genius within themselves, to stand as beacons of hope, to go forth as walking examples of genius incarnate, so that others may learn how to do the same. Here are six signs you may be on the sacred path of the Ubermensch.

1.) You Have Perfected the Art of Self-Overcoming:

“The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learned, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.” –Jose Ortega y Gasset

You have freed yourself from the smoke and mirrors of “security” and the illusion of “comfort.” Indeed, you have freed yourself to create new freedom. You have once again transformed yourself into a self-propelled beast, a sacred cycle, the walking personification of the life-death-rebirth process of the human condition. Self-overcoming (self-interrogation) is a tool of conviviality that you use to dig up the courage within the primordial self so that it may defend itself, and life itself, against the degradation of the inert self. The inert self is the part of us that wishes everything would stay the same. You understand that it is precisely this part of us which must be overcome, because permanence is the ultimate illusion. Fixed conviction is a grave error that leaves us petrified and stuck. Like Daniel Kolak wrote in Experience of Philosophy, “There is a frozen sea within us. Philosophy is an axe.” You have learned how to use this axe with self-actualized precision, and you have therefore become quite adept at bringing meaning to the meaninglessness.

2.) You Have the Ability to Transform Suffering Into Strength:

“To live is to suffer and to survive is to find meaning in this suffering.” –Nietzsche

You are willing to suffer in order to discover your greatness, knowing that pain is the ultimate teacher next to nature herself. You are purposefully vulnerable, realizing that it’s the only way to learn about the weakness within invulnerability. You recycle your vulnerability by propelling yourself and others to create waves of change in a world starving for change. You direct your passion and your compassion by spreading your art and your heart only across what matters most. Like Simone De Beauvoir, your “contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.” You seek tasks that would cause others to curl up into a ball of fear, because you have learned how to transform fear into courage. You realize that the secret to transforming suffering into strength is to embrace, and thereby subsume, the vicissitudes of change. You do not fear change because you’ve learned how to change fear into a courage of the most high.

3.) You Accept Your Own Dionysian Nature and Use it Appropriately:

“The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.” –Nietzsche

As a liberated artist you represent the Dionysian endeavor toward wild, carefree creativity. You have chosen to embody a wide spectrum of the human experience, lusting for the gruesome ecstasy of the sensual world yet capturing and expressing it all through your art. The Dionysian innovator is a perfect example of divergent thinking, which you embrace with all your heart. The Apollonian artist, on the other hand, relies on convergent thinking; which is fine, as balance is necessary. But since we live in a rigid, stuck-in-the-muck, overly convergent thinking society, you see how important Dionysian energy really is. You are not a collection of mirrors reflecting what everyone else expects of you. You are self-shattered, Chaos theory in motion, laughing mightily with God’s tongue in your cheek. You declare to the lopsided Apollonian culture, “You can have your Apollonian rigidness; I’ll take Dionysian courage and astonish you all.”

4.) You Are Neither Restricted by Tradition Nor Bounded by Convention:

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

You shirk tradition and convention in order to remain open to what the vicissitudes of change have to teach you. You refuse to live out a harried life of nine-to-five slavery, wasting your days on heartless corporations that don’t give a damn about anything except making money. Instead, you wish to live a life of adventure full of doing what you love to do, despite the powers that be and in spite of the tyranny that wishes to contain you? You use rebellion and the art of Social Gadflying as a tool for obliterating unsustainable hierarchies, and as a leveler of close-minded elitist pretension. You’re not driven by petty revenge or egoistic one-upmanship. You emphasize and actualize what you disrupt, seeking not to discredit and embarrass the status quo of your mischief, but to shock it into becoming more self-authentic. Yours is a celebration of the soul instead of the conditioned reflex and self-aggrandizement of the ego. You love what you profane, weaving your knowledge and experience together with the status quo, you honor your engagement with it even as you tweak it out of its extremism. You show them the door to their freedom and declare: “enter if you dare!”

5.) You Are Willing to Risk All For the Enhancement of Humanity:

“You go above and beyond them: but the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all.” –Nietzsche

“He who flies is hated most of all”? You fly anyway, soaring over the culturally constructed illusion of it all. You are willing to be “the odd man out,” refusing to give into the unconscious peer-pressure of the herd-instinct. Your conscious awareness propels you past the unconscious comfort zone, which is infective and causes others to want to do the same. You are wholly natural and holistically ascetic. The unconscious of anyone living in an artificial manner senses you as doubly dangerous. Everything about you irritates them, your way of writing, your sense of humor. They sense nature in you, and they are afraid. They are afraid that you will call them out; that you will break their soft illusory shell of “security” and “safety,” and reveal the pulsing blister of the vulnerable Self suffering underneath. You are an icon of iconoclasm, a force of nature that leads by example whether or not anybody else decides to “follow.” You are willing to die bringing water to the wasteland.

6.) You Seek Power Over Power:

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” –Abraham Lincoln

You have learned how to break the chain of obedience that plagues mankind. You have cut the strings dangling down from the highest echelons of power. You are capable of clipping yokes and cutting away the straps that bind the heavy burden of parochial values. You have turned the tables on the “powers that be” by getting power over power. You realize that those at “the top” deserve neither your pity nor your rancor. They deserve nothing more than your unadulterated laughter and high humor: a thumbing of your nose that all at once keeps them in check and prevents their “absolute power” from corrupting absolutely. But you have also learned, as Naseem Nicholas Taleb suggested, that “you don’t become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.” And so you have learned to recycle your own mastery. You have dared to rejoin your rationality with your primordial unconscious. You live multi-dimensionally, refusing to live the one-dimensional life of the typical man. Indeed, you stand in defense against the typical man, the “last man,” the “despicable man,” the “man who would destroy everything despite himself.” You stand in defense of those who would horde power by empowering the powerless and teaching them how to expiate that power. You disclose the world with the purpose of freedom and further disclosure, and by the same action try to free others from enclosure into disclosure. Deep within you find the exigency which is common to all men and women: the will to freedom, the will to power, and the will to conquer both so as to make compassionate action manifest. Like David DeGraw said, “The more you empower people, the more empowered you become. It creates a positive feedback loop, an evolutionary feedback loop that cannot be stopped.”

About the Author

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.

via Waking Times